Thursday, April 25, 2013

Severe drought conditions in the northern islands/atolls of the Republic of the Marshall Islands has prompted the Government to issue a State of Emergency. After relevant action plans were formalized, President Christopher J. Loeak signed the declaration on April 19, 2013, for the immediate mobilization of people and resources to mitigate the impact of drought in the affected islands/atolls.

TEXAS COUNTY, Oklahoma -
The Oklahoma State Department of Health reports a Texas County man has died due to Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome.

The department says the death is the first due to hantavirus since 2001 and is the third confirmed hantavirus death since it was first recognized in the U.S. in 1993.

Hantavirus is carried by wild rodents -- particularly by deer mice in Oklahoma. The health department says the hantavirus is transmitted to humans when they breathe in air that's contaminated by particles from rodent droppings, urine or saliva. Early symptoms of hantavirus can include fever and muscle aches, chills, headaches, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain and coughing.

A cultural war has erupted between Israel's rising political star and his ultra-Orthodox rivals.

Newly minted Finance Minister Yair Lapid, hugely popular for opposing the long-standing preferential treatment enjoyed by the religious minority, is moving swiftly to slash state handouts to large families, compel lifelong seminary students to work and join the army, and remove funding for schools that don't teach math, science and English.

The religious - labeled "parasites" by one Lapid emissary this week - are crying foul. But they appear helpless, at least in the short run, to stop Lapid from pressing his agenda.

For most of the last three decades, the country's small ultra-Orthodox minority sat in governing coalitions, securing vast budgets for religious schools and automatic exemptions from mandatory military service for tens of thousands of young men in full-time religious studies.

Hateful, surprising words from an individual detached from God, as well as the detached individuals who support his vitriol.

It's amazing how quickly people in Israel forget why the ultra-Orthodox receive the treatment they do, for after the state of Israel was formed, the intent was to allow a portion of society to pass on the religion so as to prevent it from disappearing after events of the second world war.

Now, in their material comfort, amply supplied by American weapons and apparently no longer in need of God, Israelis criticize these families for studying a scripture most of them probably have never even touched in their lives.

These individuals do not fight in wars because their duty is to preserve the religion should just such an event happen, an instruction also clearly laid out in the Quran.

One must wonder if the only obstacle to piece in that region is a bunch of men in suits, pretend Jews, who crave the material would so much and lust after wealth and power to such a gross degree that they'll sweep anyone aside, Muslim or compatriot.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reserves the right to buy up to 750 million rounds of ammunition over the next five years and currently has “two years worth” of ammo on hand, or around 247 million rounds in its inventory, the department’s top procurement official said Thursday during congressional testimony.

DHS has already purchased around 41 million rounds of ammunition this year alone, Nick Nayak, DHS’s chief procurement officer, said during an oversight hearing on Capitol Hill. Some $37 million in taxpayer dollars will be spent on the purchase of ammunition in the entirety of fiscal year 2013.

Several lawmakers on the House Oversight Committee said they were surprised by the requisition and asked why DHS has been purchasing such large quantities of ammo for its 72,000 officers, most of who rarely discharge their weapons in the line of duty.

DHS allocates anywhere from 1,300 to 1,600 rounds of ammunition per officer, or around 1,000 more rounds than is used by the average Army officer. Lawmakers called this excessive and unneeded, particularly as average American citizens face widespread ammunition shortages.

The growing underground economy may be helping to prevent the real economy from sinking further, according to analysts.

The shadow economy is a system composed of those who can't find a full-time or regular job. Workers turn to anything that pays them under the table, with no income reported and no taxes paid — especially with an uneven job picture.

"I think the underground economy is quite big in the U.S.," said Alexandre Padilla, associate professor of economics at Metropolitan State University of Denver. "Whether it's using undocumented workers or those here legally, it's pretty large."

"You normally see underground economies in places like Brazil or in southern Europe," said Laura Gonzalez, professor of personal finance at Fordham University. "But with the job situation and the uncertainty in the economy, it's not all that surprising to have it growing here in the United States."

Estimates are that underground activity last year totaled as much as $2 trillion, according to a study by Edgar Feige, an economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The whole notion of the police "manhunt" is not a new American phenomenon. Cops chase bad guys, cops corner bad guys. Sometimes the bad guys give up quietly, sometimes they go down in a blaze of glory. But we've always had rules of engagement when it came to law enforcement interaction with the general public.

It appears all that got thrown out the window in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon terror bombing and the subsequent police chase in Cambridge, Massachusetts that came to a screeching halt in Watertown.

Survivors from a garment factory that collapsed in Bangladesh killing at least 228 people described on Thursday a deafening bang and tremors before the eight-floor building crashed down under them.

Many more of the mostly female workers were still feared trapped in the rubble more than 24 hours after the disaster, which has brought renewed attention to Western firms who use Bangladesh as a source of low cost goods.

In the evening, local residents were still pulling survivors and bodies from the wreckage of the Rana Plaza building in the commercial suburb of Savar, 30 km (20 miles) outside the capital Dhaka, using crowbars and their bare hands in sweltering heat. More than 1,000 people were injured.

Taipei, April 25 (CNA) Taiwan decided to issue a Level-2 travel advisory for five Chinese provinces and two metropolitan areas Thursday after confirming a day earlier the first H7N9 bird flu case reported locally but contracted in China.

The Central Epidemic Command Center announced the listing of the five provinces -- Jiangsu, Henan, Zhejiang, Anhui and Shandong -- and two cities -- Shanghai and Beijing -- in its Level-2 travel alert after an inter-ministerial meeting.

"We referred to the three-level travel advisory system used by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention when deciding to issue a Level-2 advisory for the seven destinations," said Chang Feng-yee, head of the epidemic command center.

Taipei, April 24 (CNA) Three hospital personnel have developed respiratory symptoms after coming into contact with Taiwan's first confirmed case of H7N9 avian flu, the Central Epidemic Command Center said Wednesday. All three had taken proper protective measures when providing medical care for the patient, a 53-year-old man who fell ill three days after retuning from China's Jiangsu Province, one of the H7N9-affected areas, the center said. A survey of the epidemic situation showed that 139 local people had come into contact with the man, a Taiwanese businessman based in Jiangsu's Suzhou area, the center said.

Three of them had close contact, 26 had contact more than seven days ago (putting them past the infectious period) and 110 are hospital personnel, the center said.

Four of the hospital personnel have also passed the infectious period and have not developed symptoms, the center said.

A further three of the hospital personnel did not take proper protective measures when treating or caring for the patient, but none of them have so far shown any symptoms, the center said, adding that they will be strictly monitored until April 27.

Spain's unemployment rate soared to a new record of 27.16 percent of the workforce in the first quarter of 2013 as the number of those without jobs surpassed six million, official data showed on Thursday.

The unemployment rate jumped from 26.02 percent in the previous quarter. The number of unemployed climbed by 237,400 people to 6.2 million, the National Statistics Institute said.

Spain, once the motor of job creation in the 17-nation eurozone, is in a double dip recession, having yet to recover from the collapse in 2008 of a labour-intensive property boom in 2008 which had allowed economic growth to outpace the European union's for more than a decade.

The Spanish economy, the eurozone's fourth biggest, contracted by 1.37 percent last year, the second worst yearly slump since 1970, and the government forecasts it will shrink again by between 1.0 percent and 1.5 percent this year.

One month after the attacks that targeted its Muslim community, life in the central Burmese city of Meikhtila is still a long way from getting back to normal. Meikhtila’s police presence has been strengthened, and nearly half of the city’s 30,000 Muslim residents are now living in heavily-guarded refugee camps that they don’t dare venture out of.

According to the Burmese government’s latest figures, published in late March, nearly 12,000 Muslims living in Meikhtila fled their homes – many of which were burned to the ground – to find safety in camps set up in schools, in a stadium, and even in some Buddhist monasteries in and near Meikhtila. Several hundred more reportedly fled the region.

On March 20, a fight broke out in Meikhtila between a Muslim gold shop owner and a Buddhist client over the price of a hairclip the client was trying to sell. This incident spiralled out of control and sparked riots, which, according to witnesses, were led by Buddhist monks. Over the course of three days, 43 people were killed, and mosques, houses, and stores belonging to Muslim residents were looted and set on fire. This wave of violence then spread to several other cities in Burma.

A heated debate about Europe's austerity drive flared back into life on Thursday with leading IMF and European Central Bank officials sharply at odds and Angela Merkel declaring that Germany required higher interest rates.

With the threat of the currency bloc's break-up receding, some euro zone officials are saying now is the time to throttle back on debt-cutting drives because calmer financial markets will not react badly.

The International Monetary Fund is also pushing that prescription - for both the euro zone and Britain - but Germany and the ECB are opposed.

Eurobarometer, the EU’s polling organisation, questioned people from Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Spain, and Poland and found that Euroscepticism has grown dramatically since 2007 as leaders struggle to deal with the union’s worst ever crisis.

After three years of financial and debt crises, currency concerns, austerity measures, bailouts and fears of surrounding the surrender of powers to Brussels, feelings of mistrust have tripled in certain member states.

In five of the six countries polled mistrust heavily outtweighed trust. This is in sharp contrast to 2007, when in all countries apart from Britain the opposite was true.

Spain's unemployment rate rose to a new record of 27.2 percent in the first quarter of this year, with 6.2 million people out of work, data revealed today.

The gloomy news from the country's National Statistics Institute came as one of the top economic advisers to Chancellor Angela Merkel's government has claimed the euro may not survive more than five more years.

Dr Kai Konrad said in a candid interview with newspaper Welt am Sonntag: 'Europe is important to me. Not the euro. And I would only give the euro a limited chance of survival.'

The story of the first death from China's new bird flu, dubbed H7N9, was broken by an employee at China's Hospital No. 5, in Shanghai, over China's twitter-like social network Weibo.

The employee seemed to be upset because they were not provided with personal protective equipment, like masks, to ensure they did not catch the mystery disease.

And on March 6, someone posted on Weibo, "Ask the hospital to tell the truth." The anonymous posting went on to detail that a Shanghai family shared a terrible flu, and a 27-year-old man with similar symptoms had recently checked in. The Weibo user appeared to be a Hospital No. 5 employee, as he or she noted the lack of protective gear for doctors and nurses and expressed personal fear.

An international team of experts concluded an investigative mission to China today with both sobering and encouraging findings about H7N9, a novel avian influenza virus recently found for the first time in humans.

"This is an unusually dangerous virus for humans," said Keiji Fukuda, assistant director-general for health security of the World Health Organization (WHO), at a press conference in Beijing this morning. From what is known so far, he added, H7N9 "is more easily transmissible from poultry to humans than H5N1," the avian influenza virus that has circulated in poultry in Asia for more than a decade, occasionally causing human fatalities.

The team also reported that the available evidence points to live bird markets as being the most likely pathway for the virus from poultry to humans. Positive samples have been retrieved from poultry and from contaminated surfaces at the markets. Nancy Cox, a flu expert at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, cautioned that while it is still early, "we can now understand that the likely source of infection is poultry—that the virus originates from poultry."

Hundreds of emergency workers from more than 30 agencies converged on Los Angeles International Airport on Wednesday morning for a major disaster drill. LAX Air Exercise 2013 was described by organizers as a 'full-scale, simulated aircraft disaster drill' designed to test the airport's emergency response capabilities.

The richest Americans got richer during the first two years of the economic recovery while the average net worth declined for the other 93 percent of U.S. households, a report released on Tuesday finds.

The upper 7 percent of households owned 63 percent of the nation's total household wealth in 2011, up from 56 percent in 2009 according to the report from the Pew Research Center using last month's Census Bureau data.

The main reason for the widening wealth gap is that affluent households typically own stocks and other financial holdings that increased in value, according to the report.

The Florida college professor who sparked controversy after saying that the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School may not have taken place is now infuriating even more people by saying that the Boston Marathon bombings were an inside job.

James Tracy, a media professor who writes extensively about conspiracy theories, said that last week's bombing appears as if it was planned by the government.

'The event closely resembles a mass-casualty drill, which for training purposes are designed to be as lifelike as possible,' he wrote in a blog post.

Other topics of rumination on his site include a number of the classic conspiracy theories: the September 11 attacks, the purview of the Department of Homeland Security, the PATRIOT Act, the death of Osama bin Laden and Fukishima have all been of interest.

Two unnamed U.S. officials have told the Associated Press that the surviving suspect in the Boston bombings was unarmed when police captured him hiding inside a boat in a neighborhood back yard.

The report contradicts the Boston police department's own account of Dzhokar Tsarnaev's capture on Friday - after commissioner Ed Davies described a firefight between him and officers before the terror suspect was captured.

The New York Times also said an M4 rifle had been found on the boat - another claim contradicted by the latest revelations.

Officers had originally said they had exchanged gunfire with Tsarnaev for more than one hour Friday evening before they were able to subdue him.

But on Wednesday, the law enforcement officials told the AP that no gun was found aboard the vessel.

Striking teachers in Mexico's Guerrero state attacked the offices of four political parties and a building of the state's education department Wednesday after the legislature approved an education reform without meeting their demands.

Dozens of teachers carrying sticks and stones smashed windows, spray-painted insults at President Enrique Pena Nieto on walls and destroyed computers and furniture.

They set fire to the state headquarters of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party and another building.

This is a sorry story which encapsulates all that has gone wrong with modern democracy and how taxpayers’ money is being scandalously wasted.

It involves a quango squandering our money, a pugilistic MP and an extraordinarily large bill from lawyers. All over a £23.90 train ticket.

The saga started after a Labour MP launched a legal challenge against the Commons expenses watchdog because it rejected his claim for reimbursement of the fare for an 80-mile rail journey.

What makes the story all the more farcical is that the watchdog — which ran up a £27,000 legal bill — was set up in 2009 in the wake of the MPs’ expenses scandal specifically to save money for the taxpayer.

Spain's unemployment rate rose to a new record of 27.2 percent in the first quarter of this year, with 6.2 million people out of work, data from the National Statistics Institute showed on Thursday.

Unemployment stood at 26 percent in the last three months of 2012 while economists' polled by Reuters forecast the number of people out of work in Spain would rise by half a percentage point to 26.5 percent.

At least 175 mainly women workers were killed in a Bangladesh building collapse and rescuers searching for survivors said on Thursday that many more were trapped in the rubble of a complex that housed factories supplying Western clothes retailers.

The disaster, which comes five months after a factory fire that killed more than 100 people, could hurt Bangladesh's reputation as a source of low-cost goods and call attention to European and North American companies that buy products there.

As the death toll from China's bird flu outbreak rose to 22 with news of another victim in eastern Zhejiang Province, the World Health Organization warned the H7N9 virus was one of the most lethal that doctors and medical investigators had faced in recent years.

"This is an unusually dangerous virus for humans," Keiji Fukuda, WHO's assistant director-general for health, security and the environment told a news conference in Beijing Wednesday.

"We think this virus is more easily transmitted from poultry to humans than H5N1," he added, referring to the bird flu outbreak between 2004 and 2007 that claimed 332 lives.

The death toll from the collapse of a Bangladeshi building rose to 160 on Thursday as rescuers frantically combed through the mangled heap of the eight stories that housed a garment factory.

The building on the outskirts of the capital, Dhaka, included five garment manufacturers that employed about 2,500 workers. It caved in Wednesday, injuring more than 1,000 people and leaving many others trapped.

Rescuers had recovered 160 bodies from the wreckage by Thursday morning, said Dhaka District Police Chief Habibur Rahman.

Share and share alike was supposed to have been a lesson learned by federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies from the 9/11 attacks almost 12 years ago.

A new hierarchy was created to draw together all the work done by more than a dozen government organizations including the FBI, CIA and others.

Now, the case of suspected Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev has caused some members of Congress, almost all of them Republicans, to suggest continuing problems with what they refer to as stovepiping -- in essence, the failure of different agencies to share what they know.

Labour peer and top EU diplomat Baroness Ashton was branded a ‘national embarrassment’ last night after her work was condemned by MEPs – even as she demanded an inflation-busting increase in her department budget.

The peer came under fire from the European Parliament which said her department, the European External Action Service, was indecisive and unresponsive to crises.

In a hard-hitting report, MEPs on the foreign affairs committee said the EEAS – which they want to behave like an EU foreign office – is ‘top heavy’, has ‘too many decision-making layers’ and has been slow to respond to situations such as the Arab Spring and the conflict in Mali.

She will be replaced next year and will enjoy a £400,000 payoff over the following three years from European taxpayers.

Tory MP Douglas Carswell said: ‘For the first time in as long as I can remember, someone in the European Parliament has said something sensible.